TOKYO MASTER BANNER

MINISTRY OF TOKYO
US-ANGLO CAPITALISMEU-NATO IMPERIALISM
Illegitimate Transfer of Inalienable European Rights via Convention(s) & Supranational Bodies
Establishment of Sovereignty-Usurping Supranational Body Dictatorships
Enduring Program of DEMOGRAPHICS WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of PSYCHOLOGICAL WAR on Europeans
Enduring Program of European Displacement, Dismemberment, Dispossession, & Dissolution
No wars or conditions abroad (& no domestic or global economic pretexts) justify government policy facilitating the invasion of ancestral European homelands, the rape of European women, the destruction of European societies, & the genocide of Europeans.
U.S. RULING OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR TO SALVAGE HEGEMONY
[LINK | Article]

*U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR* | U.S. Empire's Casino Unsustainable | Destabilised U.S. Monetary & Financial System | U.S. Defaults Twice A Year | Causes for Global Financial Crisis of 2008 Remain | Financial Pyramids Composed of Derivatives & National Debt Are Growing | *U.S. OLIGARCHY WAGES HYBRID WAR*

Who's preaching world democracy, democracy, democracy? —Who wants to make free people free?
[info from Craig Murray video appearance, follows]  US-Anglo Alliance DELIBERATELY STOKING ANTI-RUSSIAN FEELING & RAMPING UP TENSION BETWEEN EASTERN EUROPE & RUSSIA.  British military/government feeding media PROPAGANDA.  Media choosing to PUBLISH government PROPAGANDA.  US naval aggression against Russia:  Baltic Sea — US naval aggression against China:  South China Sea.  Continued NATO pressure on Russia:  US missile systems moving into Eastern Europe.     [info from John Pilger interview follows]  War Hawk:  Hillary Clinton — embodiment of seamless aggressive American imperialist post-WWII system.  USA in frenzy of preparation for a conflict.  Greatest US-led build-up of forces since WWII gathered in Eastern Europe and in Baltic states.  US expansion & military preparation HAS NOT BEEN REPORTED IN THE WEST.  Since US paid for & controlled US coup, UKRAINE has become an American preserve and CIA Theme Park, on Russia's borderland, through which Germans invaded in the 1940s, costing 27 million Russian lives.  Imagine equivalent occurring on US borders in Canada or Mexico.  US military preparations against RUSSIA and against CHINA have NOT been reported by MEDIA.  US has sent guided missile ships to diputed zone in South China Sea.  DANGER OF US PRE-EMPTIVE NUCLEAR STRIKES.  China is on HIGH NUCLEAR ALERT.  US spy plane intercepted by Chinese fighter jets.  Public is primed to accept so-called 'aggressive' moves by China, when these are in fact defensive moves:  US 400 major bases encircling China; Okinawa has 32 American military installations; Japan has 130 American military bases in all.  WARNING PENTAGON MILITARY THINKING DOMINATES WASHINGTON. ⟴  
Showing posts with label Government Mass Surveillance. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Government Mass Surveillance. Show all posts

August 14, 2014

USA - JOHN NAPIER TYE & Fourth Amendment Rights - US Surveillance Abroad



By Charlie Savage THE NEW YORK TIMES


WASHINGTON — After President Barack Obama delivered a speech in January endorsing changes to surveillance policies, including an end to the National Security Agency's bulk collection of Americans' domestic calling records, John Napier Tye was disillusioned.

A State Department official, Tye worked on Internet freedom issues and had top-secret clearance. He knew the Obama administration had also considered a proposal to impose what an internal White House document, obtained by The New York Times, portrayed as "significant changes" to rules for handling Americans' data the NSA collects from fiber-optic networks abroad. But Obama said nothing about that in his speech.

So in April, as Tye was leaving the State Department, he filed a whistle-blower complaint arguing that the NSA's practices abroad violated Americans' Fourth Amendment rights. He also met with staff members for the House and Senate intelligence committees. Last month, he went public with those concerns, which have attracted growing attention.

When operating abroad, the NSA can gather and use Americans' phone calls, emails, text messages and other communications under different — and sometimes more permissive — rules than when it collects them inside the United States. Much about those rules remains murky. The executive branch establishes them behind closed doors and can change them at will, with no involvement from Congress or the intelligence courts that are charged with protecting Americans' privacy.

"It's a problem if one branch of government can collect and store most Americans' communications, and write rules in secret on how to use them — all without oversight from Congress or any court, and without the consent or even the knowledge of the American people," Tye said. "Regardless of the use rules in place today, this system could be abused in the future."

Tye, 38, is speaking out as Congress considers amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs how the NSA operates domestically. The legislation resulted from the uproar over leaks by Edward J. Snowden, a former agency contractor.

But the proposed changes would not touch its abilities overseas, which are authorized by Executive Order 12333, a Reagan-era presidential directive. The administration has declassified some rules for handling Americans' messages gathered under the order, but the scope of that collection and some details about how the messages are used remain unclear.

"The debate over the last year has barely touched on the executive order," said Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer. "It's a black box."
The Times interviewed nearly a dozen current and former officials about EO 12333 rules for handling communications involving Americans, bringing further details to light.

By law, the NSA cannot deliberately intercept an American's messages without court permission. But it can "incidentally" collect such private communications as a consequence of its foreign surveillance.

The volume of incidental collection overseas is uncertain. Officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the delicate nature of the topic, said the NSA has never studied the matter and most likely could not come up with a representative sampling. Tye called that "willful blindness."

Still, the number of Americans swept up could be sizable. As the NSA collects content in bulk overseas from fiber-optic hubs and satellite transmissions for later analysis, Americans' messages within the mix can be vacuumed up. By contrast, when operating domestically under FISA, the agency may engage only in targeted, not dragnet, collection and storage of content.

Congress left the executive branch with a freer hand abroad because it was once rare for Americans' communications to go overseas. But in the Internet era, that is no longer true.

Large email companies like Google and Yahoo have built data centers abroad, where they store backups of their users' data. Snowden disclosed that in 2012, the NSA, working with its British counterpart, GCHQ, penetrated links connecting the companies' overseas data centers and collected 181.3 million records in 30 days.

CONTINUED @ SOURCE





Fourth Amendment - prohibits unreasonable searches/seizures without court warrant & probable cause.


Good luck to this guy.  At least he's trying to do something.

It's great that there's some kind of starting point protective legal framework in the US.  Most other countries don't have that.

July 18, 2014

UNHCHR - The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age Report - Presentation due October

Article

Navanethem "Navi" Pillay
United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights


16 July 2014 – The top United Nations human rights official today warned of the “disturbing” lack of transparency in governmental surveillance policies and practices, “including de facto coercion of private sector companies to provide sweeping access to information and data relating to private individuals without the latter’s knowledge or consent.”

“This is severely hindering efforts to ensure accountability for any resulting human rights violations, or even to make us aware that such violations are taking place, despite a clear international legal framework laying down Governments’ obligations to protect our right to privacy,” UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Navi Pillay said in Geneva today.

Introducing a report compiled by her Office entitled, The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age, she stressed the need for vigilance and procedural safeguards against governmental surveillance programmes.

“The onus is on the State to demonstrate that such interference is neither arbitrary nor unlawful,” Ms. Pillay said, noting that article 17 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights states that “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary or unlawful interference with his or her privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to unlawful attacks on his or her honour and reputation.”

According to the report, to be presented this October to the Human Rights Council and the UN General Assembly, governmental mass surveillance is “emerging as a dangerous habit rather than an exceptional measure” and practices in many States reveal “a lack of adequate national legislation and/or enforcement, weak procedural safeguards, and ineffective oversight.”

The High Commissioner’s report points out that the secret nature of specific surveillance powers brings with it a greater risk of arbitrary exercise of discretion which, in turn, demands greater precision in the rule governing the exercise of discretion, as well as additional oversight. Therefore, States must establish independent methods to monitor such surveillance one that include administrative, judicial and parliamentary branches of government.

...continues @ source ...

SOURCE - UN News Centre - here

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COMMENT

Re:  Article 17

US State Department arbitrarily opens incoming overseas mail and there's been all the NSA snooping and so on ... so it's all well and good to have these UNHCHR 'rights', but they don't seem to translate to anything in practical terms.

Anyway, report will be release in October.